‘The Countess Catherine Matilda, daughter of James Count d’Albanie’ (that is, of the gentleman first known as Admiral Allen’s son), ‘married Count Ferdinand de Lancastro, by whom she had one son, Count Charles Ferdinand Montesino de Lancastro et d’Albanie, from his mother. He also served in the Austrian army, in the Kaiser Kürassier Regiment, or Imperial Cuirassiers, of which the emperor is colonel. He volunteered, by permission of the emperor, Franz Joseph, into the Lancers of the Austrian Army Corps which accompanied the Arch-Duke Maximilian to Mexico, and during the three years’ campaign he received four decorations for valour in the many actions at which he was present, two of which were given to him by the Emperor Maximilian, one being the Gold Cross and Eagle of the Order of Ste. Marie de Guadalupe, and two by the Emperor Napoleon III., and also four clasps. After the campaign terminated, he returned to Austria with his regiment, and got leave to visit his uncle, the present Count d’Albanie, then in London, where he died on the 28th September, 1873, from inflammation of the lungs, at the age of twenty-nine years and five days.’ (Signed ‘R. I. P.’)
LORD CAMPBELL, ON OLD JUDGMENTS.
Some adherents to the cause of the Stuarts have survived to the present reign, and one at least may be found who was keeper of the sovereign’s conscience, and sat on the woolsack. It is certainly somewhat remarkable to find that one of Her Majesty’s chancellors was not only a Jacobite at heart, like Johnson in part of the Georgian Era, but openly expressed, that is, printed and published, his opinions. In Lord Campbell’s life of Lord Cowper, the lord chancellor who presided at the trial of the rebel lords in 1716, the biographer alludes to the new Riot Act brought in by Cowper, in which it was stated that if as many, or as few, as a dozen persons assembled together in the streets, and did not disperse within an hour after a magistrate’s order to that effect, the whole dozen would incur the penalty of death, and might be lawfully strangled at Tyburn. ‘This,’ says Lord Campbell, ‘was perhaps a harsher law than ever was proposed in the time of the Stuarts,’ but he adds that it was not abused in practice, yet, nevertheless, ‘it brought great obloquy upon the new dynasty.’ Lord Cowper in charging and in sentencing the rebel lords in 1716, and Lord Hardwicke, in addressing and passing judgment upon the rebel lords in 1746, could scarcely find terms harsh enough to express the wickedness, barbarity, and hellish character of the rebellion and of the lords who were the leaders in it. As to their own disgust at such unmatched infamy, like Fielding’s Noodle, they could scarcely find words to grace their tale with sufficiently decent horror. Lord Chancellor Campbell, in the reign of Victoria, flames up into quite old-fashioned hearty Jacobitism, and ‘bites his thumb’ at his two predecessors of the reigns of the first two Georges. In especial reference to the ultra severe strictures of the Chancellor Hardwicke in 1746, the Jacobite chancellor in the reign of Victoria says, in Hardwicke’s ‘Life,’ ‘He forgot that although their attempt, not having prospered, was called treason, and the law required that they should be sentenced to death, they were not guilty of any moral offence, and that if they had succeeded in placing Charles Edward on the throne of his grandfather, they would have been celebrated for their loyalty in all succeeding ages.’
TIME’S CHANGES.
And now, in the year 1877, we are gravely told that the claims of the brother, who supposes himself to be a legitimate heir of the Stuarts (a supposition as idle as the claim of the convict Orton to be a baronet is infamous), have been fully investigated by a ‘delegation of Roman Catholic clergy, nobility, and nobles of Scotland,’ who, it is added, with amusing significance, pronounced those claims to be valid.’ We hear nothing, however, of the names of the investigators, nor of the evidence on which their judgment was founded. Awaiting the publication of both, the investigation (if it ever took place) may be called a trait of the very latest Jacobitism on record.[3]
AT CHELSEA AND BALMORAL.
After being a serious fact, Jacobitism became (with the above exception) a sentiment which gradually died out, or which was applied in quite an opposite sense to that in which it originated. When the French revolution showed a taste for pulling down everything that was right on end, the old London Jacobite toast, ‘May times mend, and down with the bloody Brunswickers!’ ceased to be heard. Later, too, the wearing of gilded oak-apples, on the 29th of May, ceased to be a Jacobite emblem of love for the Stuart race of kings. It was taken as a sign that the wearer was glad that a king at all was left to reign in England. It is only as yesterday that in Preston unruly lads were called ‘a parcel of young Jacobites,’—so strong and enduring was the memory of the Jacobite presence there. Now, yearly at Chelsea, the veteran soldiers are drawn up in presence of the statue of Charles II., on the anniversary of his restoration. They perform an act of homage by uncovering in that bronze presence (with its permanent sardonic grin), and they add to it the incense of three cheers in honour of that civil and religious king, and his ever-welcome restoration. How different from the time of the first George, when soldiers in the Guards were lashed to death, or near to it, in the Park, for mounting an oak leaf on the 29th of May, or giving a cheer over their cups for a prince of the line of Stuart. The significance of words and things has undergone a happy change. Donald Cameron, of Lochiel, is groom-in-waiting to the Queen; and, on Her Majesty’s last birthday, at Balmoral, the singers saluted her awaking with welcome Jacobite songs, and ended their vocalisation with ‘Wha’ll be King but Charlie?’
[3] As this page is going through the press, we have the Comte d’Albanie’s authority for stating that the above story (alluded to in ‘Notes and Queries,’ Oct. 6, p. 274) is ‘a pure invention,’ or ‘a mystification.’
THE END.